How the Structuring of Domain Knowledge Helps Casual Process Modelers

Modeling business processes has become a common activity in industry, but it is increasingly carried out by non-experts. This raises a challenge: How to ensure that the resulting process models are of sufficient quality? This paper contends that a prior structuring of domain knowledge, as found in informal specifications, will positively influence the act of process modeling in various measures of performance. This idea is tested and confirmed with a controlled experiment, which involved 83 master students in business administration and industrial engineering from Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin and Eindhoven University of Technology. In line with the reported findings, our recommendation is to explore ways to bring more structure in the specifications that are used as input for process modeling endeavors.

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